Tag: Rozé of the Recapture

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [8/11/24]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hello, folks! The season continues to roll on, and we’ve got a nice batch of writeups today that reflect that.

Anime

Code Geass: Rozé of The Recapture – Episodes 6-8

I think on some level, Code Geass has remained Code Geass. I’m struck by how despite sharing very few characters in common with the original series, this feels so much of a piece with it in all possible ways, good and bad. We’ve got our female lead tied up in bondage throughout most of this episode with the camera dead-eyed on her ass, we’ve got kamikaze attacks in huge urban battles, we’ve decided to randomly throw a cybernetically-enhanced supersoldier into the mix. Honestly, none of this is a complaint, per se. This is just what the series does; goofball shit at its finest.

On another note, I’m honestly kind of not sure that Sakuya has the temperament to be a Code Geass protagonist. Lelouch was a fairly shameless manipulator and was willing to screw over basically anyone even if he might angst about it later in some cases. Sakuya having these deep regrets about manipulating Ash feels like an overt attempt to make her more sympathetic which, ironically, makes me like her a little less. She’s still good, but, you can let the protagonist girls be bad too, you know? We’ll see how things go, there’s definitely still time for a pivot, here.

Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian – Episode 6

I have to be honest in that student politics plotlines almost never do anything for me, but the interpersonal dynamics were on point again this episode. I like that we’re seeing a slightly darker or at least more serious side of Yuki now that she’s trying to actively push Alya into either being honest with her feelings for Kuze or backing off. The entire restaurant scene in the episode’s back half is also pretty cute, and is a nice proof-of-concept that you can still play very old romcom tropes like indirect kisses really straight and have is still be decently good TV. The reaction shot where everyone else at the restaurant had their eyes bugging out of their head was quite funny.

Also, the new girl! What’s up with her? This show isn’t as good as Makeine but it’s giving that series a run for its money in sheer number of eccentric girls in the main cast.

Oshi no Ko – Season 2, Episode 6

Rarely am I left at an active loss for words by an anime. Yet, I think this is the third or fourth time Oshi no Ko has done that to me. I will, of course, try explaining anyway.

The opening part of this episode takes the form of an unbroken excerpt of the Tokyo Blade stage play. Those first couple of minutes are pretty incredible on their own, leaving the entire actual plot of Oshi no Ko itself in the margins to express a clear love for this completely fictional shonen manga and this equally fictional adaptation of it. In doing so, Oshi no Ko, and everyone working on it, express love for the shonen anime as an art form and a worthwhile format. (And, indeed, for 2.5D plays as well.) Their pastiche is pretty damn fantastic. I won’t go so far as to say that I’d rather be watching Tokyo Blade than a lot of actual shonen anime airing right now (Elusive Samurai has been great, after all, read on for more on that), but the series makes a very good case for it as a compelling piece of art. Also, in having Oshi no Ko‘s characters portray Tokyo Blade‘s characters so well, it makes a compelling case for them, too. Kana is utterly enchanting as the hot-blooded Tsurugi, even when she’s quelled by being bested in combat, and everyone else here puts in a great performance, as well. One of Oshi no Ko‘s great magic tricks is making you think about how well the characters are acting, as though these were actual people.

Which leads us nicely into Oshi no Ko‘s actual greatest accomplishment this week. Getting You, The Viewer to shed tears over Melt.

Yeah, Melt. Remember Melt? He was introduced in the first season as an actor in the Sweet Today TV drama, there instantly pegged as a good-looking but talentless piece of cast filler. He kind of ruined the whole show, it was a big thing. Melt has had a pretty compelling, semi-redemptive supporting arc in the second season, and it comes to a head here during a scene in the play where his character fights the character played by Sakuya [Kobayashi Yuusuke]. Sakuya, for his part, is a relatively recent addition to our cast, and has been previously introduced as a frivolous womanizer who likes to pick on Melt because Melt is a bad actor. In a sense, he’s Melt’s foil, being someone just as handsome but who’s had to work harder to get where he is. The two’s clash is thus both very literal but also very much a struggle for the audience’s approval, and I don’t just mean the audience watching the stage play.

During his part of the episode, Melt’s on-stage performance is cut with backstory. In a sense, this is cheating. Obviously, we the audience would have sympathized with Melt much more from the beginning if it were made obvious to us from the start that Melt’s general lack of drive is the result of a lifetime of people fucking him over because he’s pretty and assuming that he must also be vapid. At one point, brought up in passing as though Melt himself doesn’t want to dwell on it, he even mentions that he was taken advantage of when he was younger. A heartbreaking and sadly true-to-life detail that really recontextualizes a few things about the character.

Nonetheless, this is not an episode meant to make us feel bad for Melt. Honestly, there was already room to do that if you were so inclined. Instead, it’s meant to explain where the inner reservoir of conviction he draws on here comes from. Melt’s key scene in the play is a minute or two long at most, but over the course of the last several months, and at Aqua’s advice, he’s been pouring his entire heart and soul into preparing for it. Blood, sweat, tears, and sleepless nights, into this one moment.

Aqua’s advice also raises an interesting point. If everyone in the audience already thinks of Melt as a poor actor—and certainly, that seems to be the case—he can use that to his advantage. If they’re underestimating him, they’re set up to be surprised, and that is precisely what happens during the episode’s climactic scene. Struck down, Melt’s character scrambles to his feet and makes a heroic last stand against his enemy, summoning a magnetism that no one knew he had. This blindsides everybody; Sakuya, Tokyo Blade mangaka Abiko, the Sweet Today author who’s also watching in the stands, the rest of the cast, the rest of the audience, and also, you know, the rest of the audience. Us.

Again, part of the magic here is that Aqua’s advice doesn’t just explain Melt’s methods in-universe, it explains how he’s been written up to this point, as well, as everything Aqua says here applies on a meta level to Melt’s own character arc just as well as it does more literally in-universe. This is the kind of thing you can only pull off if you’re both very confident and incredibly skilled at understanding how stories work; a magic trick that seems to explain itself as it’s being performed, only for that damn rabbit to pop out the hat anyway, to your and everyone’s complete surprise. Akasaka Aka’s done it again, god damn it.

It should go without saying that this applies to the entire Doga Kobo team working on this series as well. There is absolutely nothing in their back catalogue that could’ve prepared anyone for how well they’d handle Oshi no Ko, and this is visually one of their best episode’s yet, as Melt’s sudden surge in charisma is presented as a swirled, painted acid trip. In the audience, Abiko bounces with enthusiasm that someone truly understands her work. In another audience, another mangaka cries. He is chasing after the one thing he’s been missing up to this point, depicted literally as it happens figuratively; star power. When he seizes it, he shines like a supernova.

Wistoria: Wand and Sword – Episode 5

Every episode of Wistoria has the exact same setup.

  1. Some magical feat or trial is introduced, which is difficult for even normal wizards to overcome.
  2. Will, either through his own volition or circumstance, confronts the trial
  3. One or more characters loudly expresses disbelief in Will’s ability to complete the trial. Because Will Has No Magical Talent, you see.
  4. Will overcomes the trial, either via Sword Stuff or with the help of his friends (that’s his True Source of Strength, you see).
  5. Everyone is astounded that Will has done this.
  6. End plot.

In this episode our grand twist is that the trial leads immediately into another trial afterward since this is our first proper two-parter. I don’t know, man. I just have a really hard time getting invested in a show that’s fundamentally so disinterested in, like, not even challenging its audience because that would be asking for coffee at a Home Depot, but just being any kind of interesting whatsoever.

Danmachi, by the same author, has a bunch of silly shit with magical back tattoos that double as stat screens and is incorrigibly horny. That’s not much, but it’s distinct. What does this show have going for it on even that level, so far? The magic chants which are admittedly sort of cool? At least a little? The annoying announcer guy in this episode who uses a wand as a microphone? The Statler & Waldorf-ass hecklers in the audience?

If I rub my temples to stimulate my neurons I can just barely imagine how other people might enjoy this but I very much do not, and I have no idea what I was on about last week, as this might be the most draining and dull episode of this show so far. I’m not even sure why I’m still watching it at this point. Inertia?

The Elusive Samurai – Episode 6

A dynamic, at times harrowing episode that ends with a comedic relief bit where one of the characters pisses on the camera. Truly this is Kamakura Style.

The show’s sense of humor (which I usually think works to its benefit, but I found a bit intolerable in this episode) aside, I want to talk about a specific scene here in the episode’s second half. Here, minor character Prince Moriyushi, the son of Emperor Go-Daigo, confronts Takauji in an attempt to end his reign of terror early. Moriyushi has determination, strength, and good instincts for when someone isn’t what they seem. Especially if they’re, say, possessed of literal unearthly charisma and may well be a walking force of pure elemental evil. In a different, earlier era of shonen anime, this show would be about him, but it isn’t, and when he tries to confront Takauji head on it ends absolutely terribly for him.

I think one of the absolute best things about Elusive Samurai is the way it portrays Takauji, in fact. He moves with a decidedly inhuman grace when fighting (which doesn’t even really seem to be fighting, to him), the cuts of his blade rendered as cuts in the film.

Despite the hellish surreality of what Moriyushi witnesses, he and a tiny handful of his most loyal retainers seem to be the only ones who clock anything wrong with Takauji. Even with blood-sprouting spider lilies covering the ground, everyone else practically throws themselves at him, even as Moriyushi tries to warn them that something inhuman writhes within the man. It’s disturbing stuff, and I imagine the visual similarities to propaganda film are intentional. Takauji is something bigger and more sinister than the history he sprung from or the animation he’s portrayed with, he’s something supernatural and vast and dark. One can’t help but feel bad for Moriyushi at the conclusion of this scene, he’s trapped in a situation he must truly have no context at all for.

But ah, of course the episode ends with the aforementioned comedy bit. So far I’ve mostly taken Elusive Samurai‘s humor as an attempt to heighten its more serious elements while simultaneously providing some relief from them; the jokes are an attempt to push the smothering reality of what’s going on away. That doesn’t entirely feel like it works here, especially when one of the gags is a tossed-off mention of molestation. In some sense I think you could still argue that this is how Tokiyuki sees things—everything is just one big game of hide and seek to him, after all—but I’d want the show to be making that argument more convincingly before I entirely bought it. As-is, I’ve been told that the source material eventually gives up on this particular method of humor, which feels to me like an admission that the contrast wasn’t intentional. I suppose we’ll see, going forward.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! – Episodes 9-12

It is so insane that this young genre has already produced so many absolute fucking slaps. I want to talk about the whole thing, because MyGO’s whole story is legitimately great and I love it in its own right, but I’m sorry, my entire brain has been rearranged by the last episode of the show and I need to talk about that for a minute. What was that? Who the fuck ends a show like that?

Pictured: That.

I’m not upset! Quite the contrary, that’s got to be one of the craziest finales I’ve ever seen. Sakiko [Takao Kanon] and her new band Ave Mujica essentially crash the anime, as the last episode of MyGO is much more about their first concert than it is anything to do with the title band themselves, but who could possibly complain? Sakiko, my beloved, there is so much wrong with you. You need to be studied, but also given a very large hug, but also, a hug might risk making you less unhinged, which would be a net loss for art in the world. Such dilemmas, such paradoxes! Sakiko joins a long lineage here, of masked musicians with something clearly at least a little wrong with them. Step up here little anime girl, take your place next to the Phantom of the Opera and MF DOOM, you clearly deserve it.

I so deeply want to know how the people writing this got the go-ahead to end it this way. It kind of undercuts the rest of the show? Like, not directly, but we had all those big emotional moments a few episodes back and those moments were great and real and very cathartic but surprise! the entire time the girl you probably just assumed was bitchy has had this awful home life that has inspired her to do….this. What do you even call this? Goth rock theater shit wedged into an anime that gave zero indications it would ever go there. I kind of knew about the Ave Mujica thing ahead of time but no amount of hearing about it prepares you for seeing it. What the fuck dude, I’m speechless.

When I originally posted this a few people took umbrage with my use of the term “undercut,” so I want to clarify that I think this is a positive. It’s a kind of jerking you out of being focused on just MyGO specifically into caring about this other story being threaded through the entire show and thus implicitly the entire setting. I am definitely not criticizing the show here, just kind of in awe that they were allowed to do it in the first place. I’d also be remiss to not mention the actual music of Ave Mujica itself, as their theatrical goth metal is some of the best to come out of this entire wave of girl band anime so far. They’ve put out a decent bit of music since MyGO!!!!! ended, a lot of which is even better than what they play in this episode, and it’s all well worth checking out. The girls’ band century continues.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, Tumblr, or Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Revolution Never Ended for CODE GEASS: ROZÉ OF THE RECAPTURE

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

They fucking got me again.

Let me explain. Nearly 20 years ago, a little anime called Code Geass (subtitled Lelouch of The Rebellion) premiered, and it barged into the hearts and minds of myself and so many other impressionable young teens with reckless abandon. Short of perhaps Death Note, no anime was more synonymous with a certain kind of mid-aughts I’m 14 And This Is Deep chuuni shit. Quite unlike its former chief contender, Code Geass has remained an active franchise in the years since.1 I haven’t seen them myself, but the Akito the Exiled spinoff films have their following, and the series has kept chugging along with various ancillary media too, some available in English and some not. In 2019, the Lelouch of the Re;surrection film staked out an alternate continuity where Lelouch comes back to life. That movie was a bit of an up-and-down experience, and mostly succeeded off the strength of being a movie full of Lelouch doing Lelouch Shit, but its best moments were classic Code Geass camp and proved that the franchise still had some life left in it. Code Geass has been around, so the existence of Rozé of the Recapture, a new series of theatrical OVAs that are also being streamed week to week as a regular TV series (don’t ask me how this works, I don’t know), is not too surprising.

It’s also probably not too surprising to any longtime readers of this blog that I, the Magia Record defender, think that the first episode of what some would deride as a pointless spinoff project is actually really fucking good. In hindsight, I don’t know why I ever doubted the project. I am still the same person I was in 8th grade in one very important way; I love campy goofball shit, and Code Geass is and always has been some Grade-A campy goofball shit.

Rozé of The Recapture takes place many years after some version of the original series’ events—I’m not totally clear on how many, but it’s been long enough to let some additional light sci-fi elements seep into the setting—but rehashes the same fundamental premise. A resurgent “Neo-Britannian”2 empire has once again conquered and subjugated Japan (or at least Hokkaido), once again rebranding the region itself as Area 11 and its citizens as second-class Elevens. Once again, an underground cadre of resistance fighters struggle against their imperial overlords. There are some extra elements this time around (such as a gigantic energy barrier called the Situmpe Wall that surrounds Area 11), but the fundamental premise is the same. And once again, it’s up to a Britannian outsider to help the resistance win the day. More or less. We’ll come back to that part.

The main difference is the most obvious one. There’s no Lelouch, here. He’s gone. The emperor is dead.

In his place we have a mysterious pair of Britannian siblings named Rozé [Amasaki Kouhei] and Ash [Furukawa Makoto]. Ash has yet to make much of an impression on me, but his brother is a different story. Rozé is not Lelouch—nobody could be Lelouch, that’s an impossible pair of shoes to fill—but he’s a pretty fun protagonist so far, with a whimsical and playful personality that belies the brain of a serious tactician. Rozé, however, commands a battlefield that is significantly weathered from his predecessor’s day. In general, Rozé of the Recapture has a marginally more grim aesthetic sensibility than the original series. It’s as though the order was to make it just as camp but twice as dark. Everyone still dresses like a lunatic, and the show has that same love of cutting from battlefield to command room shenanigans to domestic scene and back at a wild pace that the original did, and it even also has its love of bold—perhaps reckless—incorporation of very bleak imagery into something that’s otherwise so fun, but it does feel a bit less bright, even literally, than the original Code Geass did. It’s as though Code Geass knows it is returning to a world that is, if you can believe it, even bleaker than the one it left in 2008. Having not seen them, I can’t comment on how directly this follows from the sensibilities of the Akito the Exiled side series, but I wouldn’t be shocked if those have been quietly building a bridge from the original series’ point of view to that of this anime.

As for the actual events of this episode, despite the slightly updated setting they’ll be very familiar to any returning Code Geass heads. We open with some exposition, and after the OP, a pretty grim scene of Britannian noble siblings—both of a class of knight called Einbergs, something that seems like it will be a recurring thing over the course of this show—Greede and Gran Kirkwayne [Nojima Hirofumi and Ono Yuuki, respectively] being absolutely horrible to a group of random Japanese citizens. This culminates with Gran, the more hotheaded of the two, shooting a man he’s holding hostage in the head. When his wife cries out in grief, Greede makes a token effort to perfunctorily apologize, only to then shoot her when she understandably spits on him. The scene ends with Greede ordering his men to unceremoniously massacre the rest of the gathered group. The message is pretty clear; the Kirkwaynes are bad people, power-drunk authoritarians and bigots with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Fair enough.

So of course, our protagonists are tasked by the fabulously-named Seven Shining Stars resistance group with taking them out. Their infiltration into the Britannian base, to the extent that it even counts as infiltration, is classic Code Geass. Ash’s knightmare frame emerges from a wrapped-up present box and Rozé spends much of the scene dressed like a clown; you can’t ask for much better than that. Rozé does eventually actually properly infiltrate the base, confronting Greede, the brains of the operation, directly.

The two have a very classically Geassian back and forth. The series’ famous chess motifs return here, as absolutely ridiculously goofball as they were in 2006. Rozé and Greede strategize while poking at some kind of holographic tabletop chess display. When the moment is right, Rozé orders his brother to go all out, and back in the actual battlefield we get some genuinely riveting mecha action, complete with Ash skewering Gran and his knightmare frame with a pair of its own swords after laying down some pretty fantastic shit-talk about how Gran’s a worthless coward.

The robot is pretty cool too. We don’t get a name for it here, but look at it!

Back in the base, we get a fantastic twist here as Rozé, with Greede at gunpoint, offers the Britannian noble a choice. Or, perhaps it’s better to say that he doesn’t give him a choice per se. Because Rozé doesn’t do anything per se. There is no Rozé.

Meet Sumeragi Sakuya [Ueda Reina], the actual protagonist of Rozé of the Recapture.

I am almost never at a loss for words when writing these columns. There’s a lot to say about even fairly uninteresting anime, and Rozé of the Recapture is anything but that so far. But seriously, what the hell does anyone want me to say? They made a character who looks like Lelouch a woman and had her crossdress for most of the first episode. I’m in love, sue me. I’ve seen the phrase “Lelouch of the Transition” drift around the Internet in regards to this twist and, I mean, what can I possibly say that’s better than that? (It does say a lot that this random tweet showcasing the scene immediately following this has done more marketing for Rozé of The Recapture than Disney+, who are distributing it in North America, have, but that is perhaps unsurprising, given their track record.) This scene is what made it truly obvious to me that the show is dedicated to recapturing that spirit of the original as much as possible, hopefully without too-directly rehashing many of its plot points. Rozé of The Recapture does basically nothing at all here to endear itself to any new audiences, and it definitely isn’t going to change the opinion of anyone in the “Code Geass sucks, actually” crowd, but I honestly think that is fine. Code Geass is so entirely itself that trying to “adapt to the times” would’ve been doomed to fail. Call this the rare Millennial nostalgia play that I’m fully onboard for.

In any case, Sakuya shows off her Geass. We don’t know how she got it or precisely how it works—my reverse-engineering attempt here is that it somehow forces the target to choose between two options if they hear her give a command—but she offers Greede the choice of saving a hundred times more Japanese people than he’s ordered dead or killing himself. Suffice to say, Mr. Kirkwayne does not survive to the end of the episode.

We close on Sakuya—back in-character as Rozé—talking to the Stars. She says that she and Ash knew from the jump that this entire mission was more of a test than anything else, and asks what the real objective they’re being hired for is. The answer? To liberate an Alcatraz-like offshore prison to free some of the Stars’ comrades. It just so happens that someone that Sakuya euphemistically calls a ‘friend’—someone named Sakura, who looks so similar to Sakuya that they could be mistaken for each other—is also being held there, under the pretense that she’s Sakuya. The amount of hilarious shenanigans this is setting up is truly dizzying to consider, but the main takeaway is one very important thing; if Code Geass isn’t back per se, that’s only because it never really left.

1: Technically, there actually have been a few short story collections and one-shots and things. But I think there’s a reason that there’s no Death Note spinoff airing right now. Lelouch would whip Light’s ass in any serious battle of wits, by the way. Just saying.

2: I will be using the series’ ridiculous alternate history terminology religiously while discussing it as it airs, thank you.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.